Facebook group with activities for kids also used for research

While some teachers were posting activities, information and assignments online as schools shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Adam Maltese, associate professor of science education at Indiana University in Bloomington, knew there may still gaps of time during the day or on weekends when parents were looking for things to do with their children.

The school year has come to an end for many people, and they don’t have the same access to parks and events as they once did, he said.

That’s why Maltese and other educators, researchers and colleagues from around the country created a Facebook group called CoBuild19. The group is filled with various educational activities and challenges geared toward children, such as building a structure that will protect an egg from a 7-foot drop, making crafts from dried flowers, or playing a game to see if parents and children can guess the emotions the other person is displaying.

The group grew quickly and now has over 4,500 members.

“At first it was people are at home, they essentially have no materials other than what’s in their home,” Maltese said. “How do we get them some activity ideas that they can use without access to a lot of stuff? So that’s been sort of the underlying idea that we’ve had. Now that things are opening up a little bit, people might have greater access to resources, but still be relatively limited.”

Maltese received funding from Infosys Foundation USA and $200,000 from the National Science Foundation’s Rapid Response Research program for the CoBuild19 group. This funding enables the group to keep producing content and the NSF funding also allows them to do some research, particularly focused on activities that center on COVID-19 related ideas or how to stay healthy.

“We can do both things, so stuff that is related to virus education and COVID and then non-COVID stuff,” Maltese said. “That was really important to us because we realize that for a lot of families for sanity sake, they don’t want to necessarily focus on all coronavirus all the time, particularly with their kids.”

Maltese gave examples of questions he and colleagues are thinking about during research, like does the format of the content matter? Does a short, TikTok style video get more people excited than a 10-minute video that’s more of a how to? If a video is translated into multiple languages, does that change the engagement?

“We’re trying to figure out what levers can we push and pull to get more people to do the challenges, and then the biggest hurdle to overcome will be what levers can we push and pull to get people to share back what they did in the challenges,” he said.

Maltese said the research is interesting but also critical as more educational institutions, like museums or camps, are shifting to posting online more often.

“A lot of people are making that transformation but they have sort of done it lightly before or not at all,” Maltese said. “Trying to create things online, figuring out how to get people engaged and active is new for a lot of these groups.”

Maltese said often research is limited to a certain area or audience, but with this research, there are no limitations, so he and his colleagues are considering how to get the word out about the group, including to those not on Facebook. Maltese said he spoke to a teacher who wanted to assign one of the challenges to their students, but they weren’t all on the platform, so figuring out how to make the content useful for everyone is one of the goals for the group.

“We’re not trying to increase the group size for sales reasons,” Maltese said. “But in some way, we’re trying to sell the activities and we want them to be used and of course, in some ways, the bigger the group, the more we can sort of conduct some of this research we’re trying to conduct.”

Maltese said he and his colleagues have a plan and will create content through late June.

“I think probably around mid June, we’ll pick our heads up and take a breath and think about where things are,” Maltese said. “If it’s mostly back to normal I think we probably let the day-to-day content development sort of phase out at that point.”

If things are still similar to the way they are now, the team will think about continuing to make content, although producing more videos, activities and challenges daily is a challenge. The NSF grant only goes for a year, he said.

“We’re talking about things like syndication eventually, at some point, when do we stop creating new content?” Maltese said. “If we’ve created something every day for the last couple months, we can repackage or just even replay some of that content because it’s not likely that everyone saw it when it first came out.”

Maltese said the longer the initial period of content development lasts, the quicker they will use up their funding. If most schools are online in the fall, the group will likely seek additional funding to keep up the content, he said.

Maltese said he and his colleagues are a limited group right now, but they plan to open up a way for educators from around the world to submit ideas to them that they can help develop or develop for them.

Followed notifications

Please log in to use this feature

COVID-19 COUNT

Jun 5, 2020

Updated 19 hrs ago

Last updated noon Friday, June 5, from the Indiana State Department of Health. Cases are listed by county of residence. Private lab reporting may be delayed and will be reflected in the map and count when results are received at ISDH.

Enter the Curbside Sweepstakes for a chance to win one of two $50 gift cards to either of our great sponsors, Cafe Pizzaria and Juannita's! PLUS, check out our Curbside Directory, a great new restaurant directory to help support your local businesses!